The discovery of fertilizer—initially in the form of bird excrement—offered an answer to the age-old problem of soil exhaustion. But it also introduced an unanticipated problem with phosphorus. Read ElizKolbert on the threat of “phosphogeddon.”
In the fall of 1802, the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt arrived in Callao, Peru’s major port, just west of Lima. Humboldt had timed his visit to coincide with a transit of Mercury, which he planned to observe through a three-foot telescope, in order to determine Lima’s longitude. He set up his instruments atop a fort on the waterfront, and then, with a few days to kill before the event, wandered the docks.
A rush to some of the world’s most remote landmasses ensued. Within three years, the United States had staked claims to nearly fifty islands, including those of Midway Atoll, in the North Pacific. The Baltimoredescribed these islands as the equivalent of “a new El Dorado” and proclaimed that although they possessed no actual gold, they would cover this country’s “wasted fields with golden grain.”
The conveyor carries phosphorus-rich rock, which is mined in Bou Craa and then shipped from the coast to places like India and New Zealand to be processed into fertilizer. The mine, and indeed the vast majority of the rest of Western Sahara, is controlled—illegally, by most accounts—by Morocco, which possesses something like seventy per cent of the planet’s known phosphorus reserves.
Since the early nineteen-sixties and the start of the Green Revolution, global consumption of phosphorus fertilizers has more than quadrupled. How long the world’s reserves will last, given this trend, is a matter of debate. As the planet’s population continues to climb—it recently reached eight billion and is expected to hit nine billion in fifteen years—more and more people will need to be fed.
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